[caption id="attachment_70592" align="alignright" width="600" caption="Ryan Tubridy."]
You would be hard pressed to count the number of books about President John F. Kennedy, his astonishing life and tragic death, that have seen the light of day.
But you would be hard pressed to lay hands on one dealing with the 35ht president's visit to Ireland, less than five months before that fateful day in Dallas.
That is up until now.
Those who take an interest in the Kennedy story, and in particular his memorable four days on Irish soil in June, 1963, have long had recourse to old newspapers, magazines and archival film - but little else.
But with the 50th anniversary of the Ireland visit and of the Kennedy assassination just a year away, Irish journalist Ryan Tubridy has penned a book that captures in page turning detail the joy, the emotion and the excitement of that return of a most favorite son.
Kenney's visit as president was the completion of a great circle, the exclamation point to an extraordinary familial story that will for ever hold the imagination of Ireland and the Irish of America.
As Tubridy put it himself during a recent visit to New York to promote "JFK In Ireland, Four Days That Changed A President," the visit by JFK to the land of his forebears closed that circle that had started in a time of famine and had reached that moment of once unimagianable infinite possibility when Kennedy was elected president.
In a matter of four generations, according to Tubridy, an Irish family had made the journey from powerlessness in a blighted Ireland to being nothing less than the most powerful family in the world.
"I believe passionately in this story. It's the original 'yes we can' story. Ireland today needs this story," Tubridy, who hosts the weekly Late Late Show on RTE Television, told the Echo.
Tubridy's book was first released to acclaim in Ireland last year and has now made landfall in the U.S. by way of Connecticut-based Globe Pequot Press.
In a sense, like JFK on his Irish journey, the story of that journey has now completed its own great circle. Details at www.globepequot.com.
